Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2001, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a scientist born in the first month of the last war he was brought up in Bolton where his father a German immigrant made balloons.

Five years ago he and his colleagues were awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry for their discovery of a third form of carbon,

whose shape reminded him of the famous dome designed by the architect Buckminster Fuller for expo 67.

And so this momentous find find which is leading to a revolution in

material science became known as Buckminster Fullarine. But as a scientific

explorer he's not particularly bothered about all that development.

An artist by nature, a chemist by profession, it's the joy of discovery and creation which

inspires him.

I feel just as moved by great works of art as I do seeing

an analysis of the way the electron operates he says. They're just the same. There's no

difference. It's just a matter of language. He is Sir Harry Croteau. So you're an embodiment if you like of the two

cultures Harry, the arts and the sciences. Would you in many ways have preferred to have been

some kind of artist?

Well I wouldn't say prefer, I feel deep down that I would have been better at art than I am at science.

What kind of art?

Well my interest is in graphic art and design. I mean all my life have been involved in making posters or designing logos and when I was at university at Sheffield I was art editor for the magazine and I think my first award was a Sunday Times book jacket design.

But I suppose in Bolton growing up in the 1950s making money by being a graphic artist or indeed an architect which I think you also

looking back might have liked to have been was just not on the card was not something

it never crossed my mind my father was a refugee and was desperate to ensure that I was the only child would do well.

So he insisted that I really make sure my math, physics and chemistry homework was done.

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